ReapTheChaos:Coco LaFemme: Why wasn't that goddamn kid vaccinated? Furthermore, if your little precious bundle of joy has a communicable disease, you know, like the farking measles, why wouldn't you keep the kid at home? How brain dead do you have to be to think exposing your highly infectious offspring to god knows how many people, both adults and children alike, is a smart thing to do?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a person with the measles becomes contagious several days before the tell tale rash appears. They can show little to no symptoms up until that point and what symptoms they have can easily be mistaken for a mild cold or flu prior to the rash.

It's bad enough when grown adults are running around outside when they're sick, making themselves even sicker and exposing everyone they come into contact with to whatever is they have, but shouldn't we, oh I don't know, treat young children just a tad bit different and keep them the hell home? When I was a kid and was sick, even if I didn't look that sick, my parents kept my ass in the house until I was better. So even if the measles rash hadn't appeared, if the kid was sick enough for someone to think they might have a cold or the flu.....THE PARENTS SHOULDN'T HAVE TAKEN THE KID OUT INTO PUBLIC.

Depends, there are people out there who have been vaccinated in the past who may no longer have immunity. For example, I have Lymphoma (blood cancer), at some point, it might be necessary to have a bone marrow transplant. Essentially that means erradicating my immune system, creating a new one. This means resetting every single immunity I ever had back to zero and you can't get re vaccinated for at least a year afterward. Someones little monster could be the death of someone like me.

I say this all the time... Let's pretend for a minute that anti-vaxers are correct and that vaccines cause autism.

The rise in autism rates mostly includes the high functioning variety, like my daughter. Typically these kids will be fine but be a bit overly sensitive to light, sound, touch, etc. They might not have a good understanding of social norms. As a result, crowds are typically not going to be a great place for an autistic child, but most who are high functioning will learn to adapt in time. It might take some effort, but it's possible.

They might also have some trouble with language development. Mine is a bit behind her peers, enough so that she has to have extra help with it, and her handwriting is atrocious, but you should see her math scores. Many autistic children are very bright despite whether or not they might have language development issues. And like above, they might eventually catch up.

Yes, the extreme cases do happen, but that's not the bulk of autism diagnoses today. The bulk of diagnoses would be the high functioning variety that wouldn't have even been diagnosed 10-20 years ago. And if you're correct and vaccines are responsible for all or most of those those high functioning autism cases, then here's what you're telling parents:

You're telling parents that it's better to risk killing your children than to have them be uncomfortable in a crowd. You're telling them that it's better to risk that they have a horrible disability as a result of a preventable illness than for them to have to go to speech and occupational therapy for a few years.

So even if you're right, it'd still be a hard sell to tell me that a risk of death is a better choice for my child than a risk of having to have her placed in a smaller classroom.

I was a kid in the '50s, so Polio was THE vaccine. I had mumps, measles, chicken pox and rubella. Got Chicken Pox again at 40. Outside of infrequent bouts of shingles, the first three did me no harm. Rubella cost me the sight in one eye. So, I'm glad that vaccines are available and in favor of making them mandatory.

I don't blame McCarthy. You can always find someone saying something stupid. The blame lies entirely on the American people, who have made it a national trait to assert that ignorance and horse shiat is equally valid or even more valid than facts and science.

the problem that this poses, beyond the obvious risks to unvaccinated folks and those for whom the vaccine fails, is that this gives new vectors for diseases to be exposed to drugs and mutate, much like antibiotic resistent TB and such, coming back to bite us in the ass because nothing we have will touch them, and pharmaceuticals being such big business all but guarantees any treatments developed will be extremely expensive, making many face the choice between death and paying for the rest of their lives to the same pharmas to manage their symptoms. Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that more money goes into research for treatments of things like AIDS and cancer than goes into cure research. you hear occasional cases of someone being "cured" but they soon disappear and little further study and research goes into how it was achieved. I am often cynical about health care reform and single payer because it does nothing to put a dent in the absolute stranglehold of medical equipment and drug providers, just deals with the aftermath of the outrageous overcharging they get away with. /life saving drugs should not be patentable. //life saving equipment that cost a couple hundred to a couple grand to build shouldn't cost ten times that to the consumer. ///a CPAP machine that has roughly $150 of electronics in it costs close to $1500...why?

Why wasn't that goddamn kid vaccinated? Furthermore, if your little precious bundle of joy has a communicable disease, you know, like the farking measles, why wouldn't you keep the kid at home? How brain dead do you have to be to think exposing your highly infectious offspring to god knows how many people, both adults and children alike, is a smart thing to do?

MIND Institute, Yale study finds abnormalities in the placentas of children at risk for autism

This--time to trot out the New Obligatory Statement Re Autism and Vaccines:

Vaccines don't cause autism. It is pretty much in fact IMPOSSIBLE for vaccines to cause autism unless you give certain live vaccines to mom VERY early in pregnancy, and they don't DO that (pretty much all live vaccines are very explicitly contraindicated for pregnant and possibly-pregnant women).

What causes autism (that is not definitively linked to some OTHER genetic disorder--there are a number of genetic diseases that can cause an ASD-like syndrome) is what is referred to as a "neuronal differentiation disorder". Basically what this means in layman's terms is that the layers of the brain don't separate out quite right and there's too much linkage between neurons (which causes a whole lot of crosstalk and feedback, which explains why the kid gets overstimulated when going out to eat and having a meltdown because he's pretty much literally having a sensory BSoD at that point).

We have also found out the same problems with cell differentiation and layer-separation that occur in the brains of people with autism also occur in the placentas of infants that are diagnosed with autism (and the correlation is strong enough that this may in future be an Early Intervention Test).

The placenta is the FIRST organ that develops in an embryo, and if something shows up in the placenta it's showing up everywhere (which is why some kids with autism also have gastrointestinal issues and the like). This also means that whatever has gone sideways is something genetic.

We also know that the same problems in the placentas of infants ultimately diagnosed with autism also occur in certain chromosomal disorders, and we know that there is a definite correlation of increase of autism rates in children conceived by fathers over the age of 40--just as there's a higher rate of chromosomal disorders in women who have babies after the age of 40.

Put more bluntly: It's not the vaccines, it's your own scrambled eggs and swimmers that cause autism. Don't want autistic kids? Aim for becoming Teen Pregnant and try to avoid the radon and nuclear fallout. Failing that, consider putting some funds in prenatal diagnosis and viable tactics in gene therapy.

And just to fark with antivaxxers even MORE--one of the whole reasons we vaccinate kids against childhood illnesses is to build up herd immunity so that the moms (who CAN'T get the jab when they're pregnant) won't risk catching rubella or measles or other diseases that can essentially cause severe prenatal brain damage in their fetuses. Severe prenatal brain damage, I'll note, that tends to manifest a lot like something we'd classify as autism as well as other fun things like deaf-blindness, general farkage of sensory awareness, and intellectual disabilities...

We also vaccinate kids against some diseases to keep them from getting postnatal brain damage that can manifest a lot like something we'd classify as autism. It used to be until quite recently that there was a major risk that babies would contract meningitis--what used to be known as "brain fever"--and would end up essentially autistic AND Counting To Potato if they were very, very lucky (and just as often would end up dead OR less counting to potato and more being potato, as in "babby would end up in a persistent vegetative state"). We've knocked the hell out of the most common causes of meningitis in kids thanks to routine vaccination (not just for chickenpox and MMR, but HIb in particular--a common bacterial form of meningitis--and many countries have introduced vaccination for other types of meningitis as well).

There's also the whole "There is shiat that can kill a babby too young to get the jab and can kill even adults" stuff, too. Whooping cough, of all things, is making one hell of a comeback thanks to parents who don't get the jab because they're scared the kid will react poorly to the pertussis component of the DTaP vaccine...and, well, whooping cough is starting to kill babies again like it did in the 1920s and 1930s, and it's starting to throw folks with respiratory conditions like asthma in hospital ICUs. Whooping cough still sucks ass even if you're a healthy, non-asthmatic adult; the Chinese call it the "hundred-day cough" because that's how long it sticks around, and you basically get to experience the same sorts of gasping, wheezing, coughing-till-you-spew goodness us asthmatics get to experience during a bad asthma attack--with the difference that (unlike us LUCKY motherfarkers with asthma) you can't knock out a bad whooping cough hacking-jag with albuterol or other rescue inhalers. Nope, you just get to cough until you wheeze or puke or piss yourself or pass out. But hey, the shiat can't cause autism if it makes you cough yourself into incontinent unconsciousness or kills babby, can it?

/srsly, folks, vaccinate your kids. Yes, even the autistic ones. You only get exemptions if there's an actual doctor-confirmed medical reason to defer the shots (and there ARE some of those). Not philosophy. Not "I don't want to accept that my swimmers are gerfickt and that's why my kid has teh autism". Not "Jeebus will prevent us from getting sick and will heal us miraculously if we give half our pre-tax income to the megachurch". //if any of you non-vaxxing acolytes of Nurgle give me something I end up in hospital for because I have asthma and the drugs that let me farking BREATHE also cause a mild immunocompromise, I reserve the right to send you farkers the part of the bill my insurance won't pay. Best hope it's not during the full-cost donut-hole! :D

Uh, no. This is the kind of anecdotal stuff that leads people to give up real science, thus can lead to outbreaks in the first place.

"

The booster I had to have before I could be released with our newborn. I couldn't believe I needed a booster as I had traveled extensively and had every immunization under the sun, more than once. Oddly the doctors assured me our baby was immune, but my mother-in-law caught them from me and my pregnant sister-in-law could not visit until we were well. None of which was necessarily a bad thing."

"[T]raveled extensively" --Oh! Really. Interesting. This is just a hypothesis, but, I bet you got it overseas before you showed any signs. You may be suffering from one of the very rare vaccine failures, or partial vaccine failures. Thus you got it despite everything that an individual could do. Just because you have had vaccines "more than once" does not mean you have been properly immunized. Read the CDC guidelines.

Yakivegas:Kit Fister: ...//life saving equipment that cost a couple hundred to a couple grand to build shouldn't cost ten times that to the consumer. ///a CPAP machine that has roughly $150 of electronics in it costs close to $1500...why?

Because Free Market Capitalism! The markup on hearing aids is pretty astounding too. $3K for something that wholesales for a few hundred.

More like unbalanced development and delivery costs.Conceptionally inventing something is relatively cheap. Developing it as a viable product is expensive. You want it to work in a hospital? You may need FDA approval, you need lots of other approvals. You need to get CE certified. You have to look out for all sorts of ways that creative idiots can break it, get it wet, electrocute themselves with it, miscalibrate it, misread it. You have to test those $150 worth of parts to make sure they don't misbehave and check their manufacturers to make sure they build them consistently. You need to pay the people who do all this, now how to do all this, know how to negotiate with regulators who think they know how the process works but are unfamiliar with the actual system and don't understand why your method of testing and verification is actually more reliable than their off-the-cuff suggestions.

And they don't teach all this in school so you need to have people around to train others how to do all this. Then you need marketing to deal with the idiots who don't understand that things cost more than the raw price of the parts and trivial assembly.

it's not just hippies and dumb hollywood celebrities hating on vaccines... Michele Bachmann and Alex Jones both spoke out against the evils of vaccination. that evil big government, big science plot to ruin yer kidz!

meat0918:J. Frank Parnell: ecmoRandomNumbers: If an infant outbreak can be traced to that kid, the parents should be arrested. And sterilized.

Uh.

An outbreak of measles occurred in a high school with a documented vaccination level of 98 per cent. Nineteen (70 per cent) of the cases were students who had histories of measles vaccination at 12 months of age or older and are therefore considered vaccine failures. Persons who were unimmunized or immunized at less than 12 months of age had substantially higher attack rates compared to those immunized on or after 12 months of age. Vaccine failures among apparently adequately vaccinated individuals were sources of infection for at least 48 per cent of the cases in the outbreak. There was no evidence to suggest that waning immunity was a contributing factor among the vaccine failures. Close contact with cases of measles in the high school, source or provider of vaccine, sharing common activities or classes with cases, and verification of the vaccination history were not significant risk factors in the outbreak. The outbreak subsided spontaneously after four generations of illness in the school and demonstrates that when measles is introduced in a highly vaccinated population, vaccine failures may play some role in transmission but that such transmission is not usually sustained.

They said infant. The poor kids who never got immunized yet.

A while back a young girl died because she had yet to receive the whooping cough vaccine because she was too young. It's called social immunity. It works.

BMFPitt:zabadu: I wish I could say I hope the child gets really sick and dies so the smug, anti-vax parents can be taught a lesson, but I can't wish that on anyone, even if they are arrogant, uninformed ass wipes.

How about hoping the kid gets better, but the parents get hit by a bus so the kid can be raised by non-idiots?

Dude, getting vaccinated is like buying a fire extinguisher. It can help you put out _a_ fire, but it cannot help you put out _every_ fire _every_ time. Vaccination doesn't confer "immunity" it confers "resistance" -- e.g. an anthrax vaccination doesn't cause the white powder to bound from your skin or flee the room when you enter.

An unvaccinated person gets sicker and spews more pathogens than a vaccinated person because they had "several days to burn" before their immune system could mount an effective response. So vaccinations "prevent dis ease" by letting someone fight off the infection before becoming communicable or noticeably symptomatic.

But say someone brought their kid into a restaurant spewing diseases. [Their vaccinated parents are also probably lightly infected but not symptomatic because _they_ have the protection they are denying their kids.] And say this disease fountain sits next to a guy who is taking a break from tending to his infant son whom he will return to in moments and infect directly with the spume of the burning disease monger...? Or say he's about to walk back across the street to see his cancer afflicted loved one, or say he has HIV and doesn't know he's got no T-Cells left?

Isn't the whole point of the vaccination to help your body resist infection. Doctors work with sick people all day and they stay pretty healthy thanks to basic hygiene and their shots. Why wouldn't the same be true of you?

If you read the whole thread, you'd know your question was asked and answered already. A few times.

halotosis:shtychkn: Isn't it only a threat to others who were not vaccinated?

Depends, there are people out there who have been vaccinated in the past who may no longer have immunity. For example, I have Lymphoma (blood cancer), at some point, it might be necessary to have a bone marrow transplant. Essentially that means erradicating my immune system, creating a new one. This means resetting every single immunity I ever had back to zero and you can't get re vaccinated for at least a year afterward. Someones little monster could be the death of someone like me.

I am in your boat too (autoimmune disease and my meds shut down my immune system intentionally). My hubby caught whooping cough from another firefighter who was exposed in a call. He had to leave the house for two weeks because I couldn't risk exposure....all because this lady didn't vaccinate her kids and then allowed her relatives from South America to visit. Eleven firefighters were infected.

bubo_sibiricus:I'm sorry, you failed to vaccinate your little snowflake because you listened to a celebrity and not your doctor and now he's contracted measles from a random stranger in a restaurant?

Good.

Let the weeding of the idiots begin.

I want so badly to agree with you, but I can't. Kids are subject to the whims of their parents, and I just can't countenance making a child pay the price for the stupidity of adults. If it were adults dropping like flies, I'm right there with you, because one would presume that they're old enough to make their own decisions. But kids? Sorry, can't do it.

Not at all. Vaccination isn't 100% effective at creating immunity. Some individuals never develop a sufficiently strong immune response to the vaccine. Others develop the initial immune response, but lose the immunity at a faster than expected rate (all vaccinations lose some of their effect over time, hence why there are booster shots).

If an infant outbreak can be traced to that kid, the parents should be arrested. And sterilized.

Agreed. Except my parents made sure I was immunized when they gave out shots at public school in first grade so it's no skin off my back; maybe the idjits' dead sprogs can be attributed to "Darwin." And maybe dying of measles in a few days would spare the kids years of worse damage from their parents' stupidity later on. It is too bad there's not a germ we could target at anti-vaxxers themselves that'll spare their kids, but maybe Science can work on that.

I once read a novel about an engineered (flu?) virus that targeted only people with brown hair & brown eyes (IIRC). That's a stupid idea, it'd hit hardest at the hawt Latinas I drool over every time I go shopping, but it'd be great if a particular gene variation was common to anti-vaxxers or people who are genetically inclined to take such positions so we might develop a quick fatal infection just for them. Someday we might identify genes for bible-thumping, militant teetotaling, "Obama is a Marxist Kenyan" and such-like, so we can conjure counter-measures against that too. All it'd take is one good bundle of bugs.

Coco LaFemme:Why wasn't that goddamn kid vaccinated? Furthermore, if your little precious bundle of joy has a communicable disease, you know, like the farking measles, why wouldn't you keep the kid at home? How brain dead do you have to be to think exposing your highly infectious offspring to god knows how many people, both adults and children alike, is a smart thing to do?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a person with the measles becomes contagious several days before the tell tale rash appears. They can show little to no symptoms up until that point and what symptoms they have can easily be mistaken for a mild cold or flu prior to the rash.

meat0918:J. Frank Parnell: ecmoRandomNumbers: If an infant outbreak can be traced to that kid, the parents should be arrested. And sterilized.

Uh.

An outbreak of measles occurred in a high school with a documented vaccination level of 98 per cent. Nineteen (70 per cent) of the cases were students who had histories of measles vaccination at 12 months of age or older and are therefore considered vaccine failures. Persons who were unimmunized or immunized at less than 12 months of age had substantially higher attack rates compared to those immunized on or after 12 months of age. Vaccine failures among apparently adequately vaccinated individuals were sources of infection for at least 48 per cent of the cases in the outbreak. There was no evidence to suggest that waning immunity was a contributing factor among the vaccine failures. Close contact with cases of measles in the high school, source or provider of vaccine, sharing common activities or classes with cases, and verification of the vaccination history were not significant risk factors in the outbreak. The outbreak subsided spontaneously after four generations of illness in the school and demonstrates that when measles is introduced in a highly vaccinated population, vaccine failures may play some role in transmission but that such transmission is not usually sustained.

I wonder if the failed vaccinations were the MMR shot, or some other vaccination. Or all they all MMR now?

J. Frank Parnell:ecmoRandomNumbers: If an infant outbreak can be traced to that kid, the parents should be arrested. And sterilized.

Uh.

An outbreak of measles occurred in a high school with a documented vaccination level of 98 per cent. Nineteen (70 per cent) of the cases were students who had histories of measles vaccination at 12 months of age or older and are therefore considered vaccine failures. Persons who were unimmunized or immunized at less than 12 months of age had substantially higher attack rates compared to those immunized on or after 12 months of age. Vaccine failures among apparently adequately vaccinated individuals were sources of infection for at least 48 per cent of the cases in the outbreak. There was no evidence to suggest that waning immunity was a contributing factor among the vaccine failures. Close contact with cases of measles in the high school, source or provider of vaccine, sharing common activities or classes with cases, and verification of the vaccination history were not significant risk factors in the outbreak. The outbreak subsided spontaneously after four generations of illness in the school and demonstrates that when measles is introduced in a highly vaccinated population, vaccine failures may play some role in transmission but that such transmission is not usually sustained.

zabadu:I wish I could say I hope the child gets really sick and dies so the smug, anti-vax parents can be taught a lesson, but I can't wish that on anyone, even if they are arrogant, uninformed ass wipes.

How about hoping the kid gets better, but the parents get hit by a bus so the kid can be raised by non-idiots?